I am pleased to announce a new LDS Blog Portal focusing on mainstream and orthodox LDS blogs and bloggers:
I will now conclude my critical look at LDS Blog Portals (see Parts 1 , 2 , 3 ).
The most popular of LDS Blog Portals, LDSBLogs.org, is primarily an exercise in self-promotion. In my opinion its claims to promote the church are trumped by its desire to promote itself. This orientation is reflected in the technology itself. It favors blogs by those who are friends or who promote ideas friendly to the fringe mormonism of Dialogue and Sunstone magazines. While they try to walk a line, the conversations featured are often overly and publicly critical of the church and her divinely appointed authorities. While they may lay claim to the name “faithful,” the kind of murmuring that often goes on is not good.
Continuing my series on LDS Blog Portals from Part 1 and Part 2 .
In the previous post I discussed some of the history of LDS Blog portals and how the motivations of those creating the portals played into their design and discussed to some extent how those motivation ultimately affected how the portals are run. Be sure to check out the clarifying comments by the creators of LDSblogs.org on the previous two posts.
Now I would like to look a little at how the self-promotion marketing objective of the portal design has affected usability and technology.
Continued from Part 1: Never Show Your Face Anywhere in the Bloggernacle Ever Again
Blogging itself is still a new technology, and many people are only now becoming aware of LDS Blogs. By its nature, blogging is focused on the present. Things that were posted two or three years ago are ancient history in blog-time. So it is not surprising that the origin of LDS Blog portals is not well known.
The first LDS Blog portal that I remember was Planet LDS. Created by John Hesch and hosted by KZION Radio, originally, Planet LDS ran on the popular python blog aggregation software Planet from which its name was derived. It has since been migrated to run on the popular PHP blog platform Wordpress . I remember visiting Planet LDS as early as 2004 when I first became involved with LDS Blogging and it has been in continual operation since then. While it gets little attention these days when people speak of LDS Blogs, Planet LDS Pioneered the LDS Blog portal concept, paving the way for what was to come.
Last week, after some unfortunately contentious conversations related to my previous blog post, I was unexpectedly delisted from the largest LDS blog portal there is.
For some months now, brother Michael Otterson, who is the media relations director for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been participating as a blogger on the Washington Post / Newsweek religious blog On Faith . Each week or so the blog hosts pose a question to the panelists, who represent various religious and spiritual groups, and each has the opportunity to post an answer from the point of view of their faith.
Sister Kathleen Flake, who is a professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University, has now joined the blog as well as a second Latter-day Saint.
Brother Larry Richman is the director of the Internet Coordination Group for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has started a blog called ldsWebguy. While not officially sponsored by the church, if you want some insight into how the church is using the Internet, and even more importantly, if you want to learn about what you can do to use the Internet to help build the kingdom, go check it out.
